Corin Hardy and Sophie Nélisse on WHISTLE, the Aztec Death Whistle, and the Horror of Facing Death

Image courtesy of IFC / Shudder

By Shannon McGrew

In Corin Hardy’s newest horror film WHISTLE, from writer Owen Egerton (Mercy Black), a misfit group of unwitting high school students stumble upon a cursed object, an ancient Aztec Death Whistle. They discover that blowing the whistle and the terrifying sound it emits will summon their future deaths to hunt them down. As the body count rises, the friends investigate the origins of the deadly artifact in a desperate effort to stop the horrifying chain of events that they have set in motion. 

For the release of WHISTLE, Creepy Kingdom chatted with director Corin Hardy (The Nun, The Hallow) and actor Sophie Nélisse (“Yellowjackets”), who plays Ellie. During our chat, we discussed everything from cursed mythology, its blend of horror and humanity, and what makes this deadly whistle so terrifying.

Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. What was it about the concept of WHISTLE that made you both want to be a part of this? 

Corin Hardy: There were three things in Owen’s script: the mythology surrounding this cursed object of a death whistle that I’d never seen on screen before. It was quite exciting in a horror movie world to think we could be the first people to make a movie surrounding a death whistle. The mythology that Owen created was also very effective, elegant, and scary. If you hear the sound of this thing, it calls upon your future death to hunt you down. And then the third thing was this sort of undercurrent of a love story that was flowing through it with these characters you could really relate to and want to care for, with this blossoming love story between Sophie’s character, Ellie, and Daphne’s character, Chrys, and how they’re finding each other amid all of this terror and carnage. Oh, and I love the death sequences. 

Sophie Nélisse: For me, it was that the script balanced horror and humanity so well. I think there is a more profound message to this film. My biggest takeaway is the idea of coming to terms with death being universal, and there’s no outrunning it, and there’s nothing you can do about it. I think as a society, we’re so scared of it, and we obviously try to outrun it. We’re scared of aging; we’re scared of looking older because it reminds us of life's finality. Ultimately, I think there’s something very serene about being at peace with the idea of dying. Being okay with it just means that you’ll live your life to the fullest and not take a day for granted. 

Image Courtesy of IFC / Shudder

Corin, your films often rely on slow-building dread rather than constant jump scares. How did you approach the pacing and tension in WHISTLE to make sure the scares landed at the right moments?

Corin Hardy: There are definitely more big moments in WHISTLE than in my other movies. The visitations that happened before the actual death confrontations are kind of part of the tension building and the strangeness – the idea of coming in contact with your future death, but not knowing what you saw or what it reflected or the meaning of it was kind of an interesting thing. 

The actual sequences themselves required a variety of techniques to pull off and were very deliberate in trying to make everyone feel emotional, shocked or gory, or a different sort of subgenre of horror in each one. 

Sophie, your character has so much strength, and she doesn’t back down even when things go from bad to worse. What do you hope audiences understand about her by the end of the film?

Sophie Nélisse: No matter how set your life is in your head, and she has very clear ambitions of where she wants to be, and she’s always been very rational, very practical, I think you can still be surprised by events and things and people that come into your life. There’s something quite beautiful in steering away from all your strict and maybe more rigid values and ways of seeing life. I think that’s exactly what Chrys brings to Ellie, this breath of fresh air, and that it’s okay to be a bit more rebellious and a bit more wild and risk-taking. 

Was there any moment on set where anything became scarier than it was supposed to? 

Sophie Nélisse: In the film, there is a Harvest Fest, and I was noticing all the people walking around in these costumes that were so elaborate. Even all the extras were wearing these really fun things. Although it was quite beautiful, I was always like, maybe there’s a secret serial killer in here [Laughs]. 

Corin Hardy: The maze was phenomenal. Jennifer Spence, our production designer, created five sections of a huge 10-foot-high straw bale maze in the studio. We created it and built a whole fairground for the exterior. Any time I went into any of the sections, I would get lost. When you’re shooting something like that, you’re shooting in different sections nonchronologically, and you’re shooting different characters for different reasons, and you get really disoriented. To get in and out of the maze sections, you had to remember where they were. You’d come out and exit, and you’re in the bottom half of the studio, and you’re like, which way round did I just go? I spent most of the time getting lost in it, but yeah, it was kind of creepy when it was all lit, and all the extras are waiting, and everyone’s masked up. 

WHISTLE is now in theaters.